Editor’s note: FLYING staff writer and CFI Meg Godlewski is an expert on survival techniques for pilots. She wrote the survival chapter of AOPA’s ground school for CFIs. In this two-part series, she instructs pilots on how to build a survival kit, as well as how you can survive if you’re forced to make an […]
The great American radio and television comedian George Burns emerged in America during the vaudeville era and became known as a king of the one-liners delivered in his uniquely subtle deadpan style—and always with an El Producto cigar between the fingers of his left hand. Before his death in 1996 at the age of 100, […]
Part of being able to forecast comes from reading the sky, because so much of what’s taking place in the atmosphere can be seen visually. When I worked the forecast counter in the Air Force, I occasionally stepped over to the window for a quick look while filling out the weather briefing forms. The pilots […]
The pilot, 40, was an instrument flight instructor and held a commercial certificate, with airplane single-engine and multiengine land ratings and an instrument rating. He had something over 1,400 hours and made his living giving flight instruction. His logbook displayed the required endorsement for “training stall awareness, spin entry, spins and spin-recovery procedures.” He mostly […]
This story originally published in the September 2004 issue of Flying Magazine. It is about six o’clock in the morning. I am witnessing a brilliant golden sunrise; a few layers of thin clouds accent the picturesque view. The New York City skyline begins to appear as a faint silhouette on the horizon. I am seated […]
The silence on the Potomac Approach frequency was stark. It was September 17, 2001, and I was flying a Piper Archer from KFDK in Frederick, Maryland, down to Newport News (KPHF), Virginia, logging two hours down and 1.7 on the return. I filed IFR on a day of shockingly blue skies because that was the […]
In May 2019, two men took off from Tipton Airport (KFME) in Fort Meade, Maryland, for a pleasure flight. They were in a Guimbal Cabri G2 helicopter, and had hoped to find and photograph a relative of the passenger who was fishing from a boat in the Chesapeake Bay. The morning was foggy; when the […]
Laypeople are both astonished at a pilot’s abilities and wholly unimpressed during the act of flight itself. They sleep like children during instrument approaches to minimums but lose their minds when they get even a taste of light turbulence in the flight levels. It seems most people don’t know what to be afraid of and […]
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